Chapter Thirty-three

A mile or so away through the wood, Arthur Dent was too busily
engrossed with what he was doing to hear Ford Prefect approach.

What he was doing was rather curious, and this is what it was: on a
wide flat piece of rock he had scratched out the shape of a large
square, subdivided into one hundred and sixty-nine smaller squares,
thirteen to a side.

Furthermore he had collected together a pile of smallish flattish
stones and scratched the shape of a letter on to each. Sitting
morosely round the rock were a couple of the surviving local native
men whom Arthur Dent was trying to introduce the curious concept
embodied in these stones.

So far they had not done well. They had attempted to eat some of them,
bury others and throw the rest of them away. Arthur had finally
encouraged one of them to lay a couple of stones on the board he had
scratched out, which was not even as far as he'd managed to get the
day before. Along with the rapid deterioration in the morale of these
creatures, there seemed to be a corresponding deterioration in their
actual intelligence.

In an attempt to egg them along, Arthur set out a number of letters on
the board himself, and then tried to encourage the natives to add some
more themselves.

It was not going well.

Ford watched quietly from beside a nearby tree.

``No,'' said Arthur to one of the natives who had just shuffled some
of the letters round in a fit of abysmal dejection, ``Q scores ten you
see, and it's on a triple word score, so ... look, I've explained the
rules to you ... no no, look please, put down that jawbone ...
alright, we'll start again. And try to concentrate this time.''

Ford leaned his elbow against the tree and his hand against his head.

``What are you doing, Arthur?'' he asked quietly.

Arthur looked up with a start. He suddenly had a feeling that all this
might look slightly foolish. All he knew was that it had worked like a
dream on him when he was a chid. But things were different then, or
rather would be.

``I'm trying to teach the cavemen to play Scrabble,'' he said.

``They're not cavemen,'' said Ford.

``They look like cavemen.''

Ford let it pass.

``I see,'' he said.

``It's uphill work,'' said Arthur wearily, ``the only word they know
is grunt and they can't spell it.''

He sighed and sat back.

``What's that supposed to achieve?'' asked Ford.

``We've got to encourage them to evolve! To develop!'' Arthur burst
out angrily. He hoped that the weary sigh and then the anger might do
something to counteract the overriding feeling of foolishness from
which he was currently suffering. It didn't. He jumped to his feet.

``Can you imagine what a world would be like descended from those ...
cretins we arrived with?'' he said.

``Imagine?'' said Ford, rising his eyebrows. ``We don't have to
imagine. We've seen it.''

``But ...'' Arthur waved his arms about hopelessly.

``We've seen it,'' said Ford, ``there's no escape.''

Arthur kicked at a stone.

``Did you tell them what we've discovered?'' he asked.

``Hmmmm?'' said Ford, not really concentrating.

``Norway,'' said Arthur, ``Slartibartfast's signature in the glacier.
Did you tell them?''

``What's the point?'' said Ford, ``What would it mean to them?''

``Mean?'' said Arthur, ``Mean? You know perfectly well what it means.
It means that this planet is the Earth! It's my home! It's where I was
born!''

``Was?'' said Ford.

``Alright, will be.''

``Yes, in two million years' time. Why don't you tell them that? Go
and say to them, `Excuse me, I'd just like to point out that in two
million years' time I will be born just a few miles from here.' See
what they say. They'll chase you up a tree and set fire to it.''

Arthur absorbed this unhappily.

``Face it,'' said Ford, ``those zeebs over there are your ancestors,
not these poor creatures here.''

He went over to where the apemen creatures were rummaging listlessly
with the stone letters. He shook his head.

``Put the Scrabble away, Arthur,'' he said, ``it won't save the human
race, because this lot aren't going to be the human race. The human
race is currently sitting round a rock on the other side of this hill
making documentaries about themselves.''

Arthur winced.

``There must be something we can do,'' he said. A terrible sense of
desolation thrilled through his body that he should be here, on the
Earth, the Earth which had lost its future in a horrifying arbitrary
catastrophe and which now seemed set to lose its past as well.

``No,'' said Ford, ``there's nothing we can do. This doesn't change
the history of the Earth, you see, this is the history of the Earth.
Like it or leave it, the Golgafrinchans are the people you are
descended from. in two million years they get destroyed by the
Vogons. History is never altered you see, it just fits together like a
jigsaw. Funny old thing, life, isn't it?''

He picked up the letter Q and hurled it into a distant pivet bush
where it hit a young rabbit. The rabbit hurtled off in terror and
didn't stop till it was set upon and eaten by a fox which choked on
one of its bones and died on the bank of a stream which subsequently
washed it away.

During the following weeks Ford Prefect swallowed his pride and struck
up a relationship with a girl who had been a personnel officer on
Golgafrincham, and he was terribly upset when she suddenly passed away
as a result of drinking water from a pool that had been polluted by
the body of a dead fox. The only moral it is possible to draw from
this story is that one should never throw the letter Q into a pivet
bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable.

Like most of the really crucial things in life, this chain of events
was completely invisible to Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent. They were
looking sadly at one of the natives morosely pushing the other letters
around.

``Poor bloody caveman,'' said Arthur.

``They're not ...''

``What?''

``Oh never mind.''

The wretched creature let out a pathetic howling noise and banged on
the rock.

``It's all been a bit of waste of time for them, hasn't it?'' said
Arthur.

``Uh uh urghhhhh,'' muttered the native and banged on the rock again.

``They've been outevolved by telephone sanitizers.''

``Urgh, gr gr, gruh!'' insisted the native, continuing to bang on the
rock.

``Why does he keep banging on the rock?'' said Arthur.

``I think he probably wants you to Scrabble with him again,'' said
Ford, ``he's pointing at the letters.''

``Probably spelt crzjgrdwldiwdc again, poor bastard. I keep on
telling him there's only one g in crzjgrdwldiwdc.''

The native banged on the rock again.

They looked over his shoulder.

Their eyes popped.

There amongst the jumble of letters were eight that had been laid out
in a clear straight line.

They spelt two words.

The words were these:

``Forty-Two.''

``Grrrurgh guh guh,'' explained the native. He swept the letters
angrily away and went and mooched under a nearby tree with his
colleague.

Ford and Arthur stared at him. Then they stared at each other.

``Did that say what I thought it said?'' they both said to each other.

``Yes,'' they both said.

``Forty-two,'' said Arthur.

``Forty-two,'' said Ford.

Arthur ran over to the two natives.

``What are you trying to tell us?'' he shouted. ``What's it supposed
to mean?''

One of them rolled over on the ground, kicked his legs up in the air,
rolled over again and went to sleep.

The other bounded up the tree and threw horse chestnuts at Ford
Prefect. Whatever it was they had to say, they had already said it.

``You know what this means,'' said Ford.

``Not entirely.''

``Forty-two is the number Deep Thought gave as being the Ultimate
Answer.''

``Yes.''

And the Earth is the computer Deep Thought designed and built to
calculate the Question to the Ultimate Answer.``

``So we are led to believe.''

``And organic life was part of the computer matrix.''

``If you say so.''

``I do say so. That means that these natives, these apemen are an
integral part of the computer program, and that we and the
Golgafrinchans are not.''

``But the cavemen are dying out and the Golgafrinchans are obviously
set to replace them.''

``Exactly. So do you see what this means?''

``What?''

``Cock up,'' said Ford Prefect.

Arthur looked around him.

``This planet is having a pretty bloody time of it,'' he said.

Ford puzzled for a moment.

``Still, something must have come out of it,'' he said at last,
``because Marvin said he could see the Question printed in your brain
wave patterns.''

``But ...''

``Probably the wrong one, or a distortion of the right one. It might
give us a clue though if we could find it. I don't see how we can
though.''

They moped about for a bit. Arthur sat on the ground and started
pulling up bits of grass, but found that it wasn't an occupation he
could get deeply engrossed in. It wasn't grass he could believe in,
the trees seemed pointless, the rolling hills seemed to be rolling to
nowhere and the future seemed just a tunnel to be crawled through.

Ford fiddled with his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic. It was silent. He sighed
and put it away.

Arthur picked up one of the letter stones from his home-made Scrabble
set. It was a T. He sighed and out it down again. The letter he put
down next to it was an I. That spelt IT. He tossed another couple of
letters next to them They were an S and an H as it happened. By a
curious coincidence the resulting word perfectly expressed the way
Arthur was feeling about things just then. He stared at it for a
moment. He hadn't done it deliberately, it was just a random chance.
His brain got slowly into first gear.

``Ford,'' he said suddenly, ``look, if that Question is printed in my
brain wave patterns but I'm not consciously aware of it it must be
somewhere in my unconscious.''

``Yes, I suppose so.''

``There might be a way of bringing that unconscious pattern forward.''

``Oh yes?''

``Yes, by introducing some random element that can be shaped by that
pattern.''

``Like how?''

``Like by pulling Scrabble letters out of a bag blindfolded.''

Ford leapt to his feet.

``Brilliant!'' he said. He tugged his towel out of his satchel and
with a few deft knots transformed it into a bag.

Arthur closed his eyes and plunged his hand into the towelful of
stones. He jiggled them about, pulled out four and handed them to
Ford. Ford laid them along the ground in the order he got them.

``W,'' said Ford, ``H, A, T ... What!''

He blinked.

``I think it's working!'' he said.

Arthur pushed three more at him.

``D, O, Y ... Doy. Oh perhaps it isn't working,'' said Ford.

``Here's the next three.''

``O, U, G ... Doyoug ... It's not making sense I'm afraid.''

Arthur pulled another two from the bag. Ford put them in place.

``E, T, doyouget ... Do you get!'' shouted Ford, ``it is working!
This is amazing, it really is working!''

``More here.'' Arthur was throwing them out feverishly as fast as he
could go.

``I, F,'' said Ford, ``Y, O, U, ... M, U, L, T, I, P, L, Y, ... What
do you get if you multiply, ... S, I, X, ... six, B, Y, by, six by ...
what do you get if you multiply six by ... N, I, N, E, ... six by
nine ...'' He paused. ``Come on, where's the next one?''

``Er, that's the lot,'' said Arthur, ``that's all there were.''

He sat back, nonplussed.

He rooted around again in the knotted up towel but there were no more
letters.